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** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Hi, I'm Elle. I'm based in Auckland, New Zealand. I'm the mother of two young adults, the wife of an entrepreneurial gamer and the Queen of Unfinished Projects. This blog will contain poems, short stories, possibly photos and book reviews if you're lucky, and my thoughts on a variety of topics. Hope you enjoy it. |
Prompt: “If you have no suffering, you have no story to tell.” ~ E.J.Koh, The Magical Language of Others ~ "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"  I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. As someone who is passionate about genealogy and family history, I can categorically say that suffering and grief are not the things we want to know about our ancestors. Despite that most of us think that the big occasions in our lives are the most noteworthy - births, marriages, deaths - it is often the daily life of our ancestors that is the most interesting. How did they do household chores? How did they earn money? How much did products and foodstuffs cost? What technology or conveniences were available to them? How did they spend their free time? Generally speaking, births, deaths and marriages are the easiest things to find out about an ancestor. It's not always easy to find out even that much, but those are usually the bare bones we get. But they don't tell us much about who our ancestor was. What makes my great-grandmother different from me? If she was born, got married and had two kids, was she any different to me at all? The answer, of course, is yes. She lived a very different life to me. But it's not evident from those bare bones facts. We get a lot of information from the DATES of those facts. Having two children in the 1890s is very different from having two children in the 2000s. And we can understand some of the era that she lived in and what technology would have been available to her because we know what years she lived. We can learn a bit more based on the PLACES of those facts. She lived in England, which would have been a significantly different place to some of the colonies back then. But what really intrigues me are the details. She worked as a midwife and 'did laundry for gentlemen, one of whom was Sir Neville Chamberlain. She would iron fancy tablecloths and maids’ hats with crimping irons heated on a wood stove, and used buffing irons, and curved irons for collars.’ She was remembered as strong but caring, and with a skill for reading books aloud to children. How amazing is that? Just a little insight into my great-grandmother. I only know those insights into my great-grandmother because my grandfather wrote a memoir of sorts. He didn't write a memoir because he had a story of suffering to tell. Yes, he was young when he lost his father, but he was always loved, never abused. Yes, he went to war, but he doesn't actually spend much time on that period of his life in his story. Instead he talks about collecting hazelnuts and salting them then burying them in barrels in the ground to dig up again at Christmastime. He talks about collecting eggs for breakfast before school. He talks about using a horse and cart to go out for a day's entertainment at the horse races. He talks of fishing with his brothers and skating on the Basingstoke-Aldershot Canal in winter. He talks of his mother baking lardy cakes and eating honey they'd drained from wild honeycomb they'd collected. Those are the kinds of things we want to know about our ancestors. Not the abuse they suffered. Not the grief they endured. Not the despairs of poverty they lived through. So yes, I strongly disagree with the original quote. And if you ever thought about writing a memoir but didn't think your life was great enough or sad enough, you're wrong. It's the everyday details that are the most interesting. |
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